August 16, 2005, 8:30 a.m.
Unreasonable Searches
Policing without profiling makes no sense.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the August 29, 2005, issue of National Review.

Year four of the War on Terror is coming to a close with the bombing of London’s mass-transit system by Islamist terrorists. Year three saw the Islamists bomb Madrid’s railway, as well as synagogues, businesses, and the British consulate in Istanbul. In year two, they struck a resort in Kenya, nightclubs in Bali, and Western citizens in Casablanca and Riyadh. And in year one, even as we waged a massive counterattack in the aftermath of 9/11, they managed to savage a synagogue in Tunisia.

There is a pattern here — but the U.S. government seems to be incapable of detecting it. We have met the enemy, and it is militant Islam. Yet we refuse to acknowledge that fact, pretending that the enemy is “terror” — a method of attack — rather than the terrorists who employ that method. The latest expression of our refusal to identify the enemy is our ongoing debate over “racial profiling.” One cannot listen to this debate without wondering whether three decades of political correctness have undermined not only the common sense necessary for survival, but our will to survival itself…

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